What remains

Marcus Glahn, Alina Simmelbauer

Minorities, traditions, and identity – what lies behind these concepts?

Nowadays, we see our lives rattled by the popular success of right-wing political groups: democracy is suddenly up for debate. The works of Alina Simmelbauer and Marcus Glahn are documentary in character and juxtapose historical memory with current events. The two young photographers from Thuringia seek to disentangle living destinies and issues of ethnic heritage.

In García’s Daughter, Alina Simmelbauer presents a group that was never able to become a group due to a dictate of silence: the children of people from socialist ‘brother states’ under contract to work in East Germany. Archival images, fragments of correspondence, and the looks in people’s eyes give rise to a space suspended between state directive and personal biography.

Marcus Glahn’s atmospheric portraits and landscape photographs depict some Transylvanian Saxons he encountered – and pose the question: ‘What should one do?’ With its more than 800-year history, this ethnic minority is the oldest extant group of German settlers in Eastern Europe.